Howard Pyle's Illustrations as Shorthand Icons

Abstract

Howard PyIe 's Illustrations as Shorthand Icons by Lucien L. Agosta The pleasures of Howard Pyle's prose are many. His Robin Hood, his fairytale collections, his four-volume Arthuriad evince a masterfully created idyllic realm, the innocence and robust freshness of which still propel the contemporary reader through the green borders of Arcadia. Pyle's Arcadia is sun-drenched and invigorating; its habitations airy and spacious; its citizens robust and exuberant, endowed with a delight and youthful wonder at the ample proportions of the land they occupy and at the fullness of creation in general, readers are conducted through this Arcadia by witty, colloquial narrators who relate to their auditors as to intimate friends. Pyle's works for young people, even his more sober historical romances like Otto of the Silver Hand and Men of Iron, are unhurried in their unfolding and elaborated in verbal style, his action-filled plots frequently interrupted by leisurely descriptions of setting and season, by stunningly delineated word pictures which provide a roundness to his created realm. Pyle's deliberate but sprightly prose everywhere demonstrates his joy in the act of telling and, for the patient and literate reader, works an incantatory spell, a pleasant enmeshing in a bright, loose web of colorful words. But Pyle's 19th-century illustrated texts appeal to the visually astute as well as to the verbally sophisticated. The diffuse and cumulative pleasures of the prose are concentrated in the immediacy of vision in Pyle's illustrations. Whereas Pyle's prose offers a measured unfolding culminating in understanding, his illustrations provide exact and instantaneous moments of insight, sudden illuminations, thematic compressions of prose intent. His illustrations are shorthand icons, hieroglyphics which distill character and event in complex but precise and economical ways. Thus, while Pyle's prose yields a temporal/spatial narrative progression-intime , a leisurely accretion of character, setting, and incident, his illustrations provide an accompanying condensation, a crystallization of theme, motive, action. The illustrations provide, at regular intervals, visual vantage points or promontories from which Pyle's readers are able to survey the verbal domain through which they journey. From these pictorial elevations above the narrative field, readers may scan the prose terrain ahead or review the territory just traversed. Ironically, Pyle's illustrations take readers momentarily out of the narrative in order to immerse them more fully in it. The patterned verbovisual counterpointing in a PyIe text thus sets up a rhythmic alternation between verbal diffusion and visual concision, between incremental disclosure and sudden revelation. In this paper I hope to demonstrate how representative illustrations from three of Pyle's best-known works, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Otto of the Silver Hand, and the four-volume Arthuriad, function as condensed visual indices to the concerns of the text segments which embed them, as lookouts or observations commanding overviews of large textual tracts. In his first book, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), PyIe perfected this complex verbovisual technique of illuminating his leisurely prose with brilliant flashes of pictorial insight. The work involves a rich prose expansion of the skeletal source ballads into a rounded, coherent narrative studded with metaphor, clever aphorisms, and luxuriant word pictures. To counteract this diffusion of ballad intensity, PyIe employed his illustrations to recapture much of the visceral immediacy of his traditional sources. For example, in Part Seven of the work, PyIe tells of Robin's close call in escaping capture by the King's men, his detailed prose providing for the reader a cumulative and mounting tension. In the complementary illustration for this extended prose passage (241) however, PyIe enables the viewer to share in an immediate and empathetic way Robin's feeling of entrapment, of being hedged round by danger. The wattled enclosure in the background of the illustrations surrounds and seems to trap Robin while the stave fence at right foreground cuts off his escape in that direction. Encumbered by quiver, bow, sword, dagger, and horn, Robin's body is snared between his longbow and its string and bound by quiver and hat straps as well as by the jerkin thongs banded across his chest. Too, the massive, ornate borders at top and bottom burden the...